Contact centers are systems in which a person can communicate to receive information. Such communication can include, but is not limited to, telephone calls, Internet access, email, and FAX. A contact center can include one or more interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The one or more IVRs provide automatic branching voice queries to which the caller responds with button pushes on a telephone keypad or with voice responses on a telephone. The contact center may be provided having only the one or more IVR systems, or alternatively, it is also provided having human agents. For example, at the end of the IVR branching voice queries, the caller can be directed to press zero to speak to an agent. The agent is a person having a telephone to talk to the caller, hereafter referred to as an “agent telephone,” and a computer to access information about the caller, hereafter referred to as an “agent computer.” Note that though the agent telephone and the agent computer are often associated with one person, they correspond to distinct electronic systems and will be separately referred to herein.
The contact center can also include one or more database server computers, one or more database storage areas, one or more web server computers, and one or more email server computers. As described above, contact center actions include actions generated by agents within the contact center as well as actions by people outside of the contact center, for example telephone callers and web users.
Contact center functions include data transfers that occur within the contact center, and such data can be internal to the contact center or can be provided to agents, telephone callers and web users. Contact center functions include, but are not limited to, accesses to and responses from the IVR, Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) transactions, screen pops, accesses to the application server, accesses to the database server, accesses to the web server, and accesses to the email server. A screen pop (screen population) is typically rendered by a contact center agent application. A screen pop is rendered in response to the receipt of call variables from a CTI server. The application may directly display the call variables or use the call variables to perform a look-up of customer data in a database and render the customer data. CTI refers to systems that enable a computer to act as a call center, accepting incoming calls and routing them to the appropriate device or person. CTI systems can handle all sorts of incoming and outgoing communications, including phone calls, faxes, and Internet messages. Screen pops are provided to an agent to correlate identifying information with caller data.
Various types of test data are of interest to contact center designers and managers. In particular, a variety of delay time periods or latencies are of interest. For example, contact center designers are interested in the time latency between a variety of the telephony caller actions, the agent telephony actions, the agent computer actions, the web user actions, and the contact center functions. The telephony caller action can, for example, correspond to an IVR selection, using the telephone keypad, as a request for connection to an agent generated by the telephone caller system. The contact center function can, for example, correspond to a screen pop upon the agent computer associated with the agent computer system. The time latency of interest can, for example, correspond to the time period between the request for connection to an agent and the screen pop.